SENIOR technician Chan Chee Kong, 54, found himself scrutinising food-product barcodes after reading an e-mail he recently received.
The e-mail claimed that consumers would be able to differentiate between Taiwan- and China-produced food by decoding the first three digits of the 13-digit European Article Number (EAN) barcode usually found on packaging.
The EAN-13 barcode is defined by global-standards organisation GS1, which administers barcodes for retail goods in about 140 member countries. EAN is a superset of the Universal Product Code - the world's first barcode symbology.
The latter was formally established in 1973. Singapore got its assigned GS1 prefix back in 1986 or 1987, according to a local GS1 spokesman. China's assigned GS1 prefixes are 690, 691 and 692, while Taiwan's is 471.
The e-mail went on to exhort its recipients to avoid food products with China- assigned barcodes, referring to the recent scandal surrounding tainted China-made food products.
Mr Chan found out that, contrary to what the e-mail said, his Chinese cooking wines bore the Singapore-assigned prefix 888, despite being labelled as a product of China.
He told my paper that he also discovered Malaysian products that appeared to have been re-packaged in Singapore had the '888' barcode on their labels.
So, while it is true that each country does have a unique three-digit prefix, it does not reflect the origin of its contents.
This is stated in bold on the GS1 website: "GS1 prefixes do not provide identification of country of origin for a given product."
It added that the prefixes indicate only the locations from which companies apply for the barcode. In other words, a company that registers its barcode in Singapore will carry the '888' prefix on its products, even if they were manufactured elsewhere.
A spokesman for the Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority said that the agency does not have any regulation pertaining to barcodes on food packaging.
However, Singapore's food regulations do require that basic information - such as a list of ingredients, the name and address of the manufacturer or importer, and the country of origin - be declared on food labels in English.
